All electronic devices, and the integrated circuits used in those devices, have to Electromagnetic Compatible. The electronic devices and their circuitries may emit electromagnetic radiation and it has been defined by standardization organizations within which boundaries electromagnetic radiation may be emitted. An operation of circuitries and integrated circuits of the electronic device may also be influenced by electromagnetic radiation and it has been defined within which amount of ambient electromagnetic radiation the electronic devices should operate errorless.
To guarantee that designed integrated circuits operate well within the limits defined by the standardization organizations, designers of an integrated circuit design have to perform ElectroMagnetic Compatibility (EMC) tests. These EMC tests are often performed by means of simulations of the EMC behaviour of the integrated circuit to detect which current paths contribute to a too large extent to the radiation of electromagnetic energy or which current paths are to a too large extent susceptible for ambient electromagnetic radiation.
It is quite complicated to perform the simulations and EMC tests for integrated circuit designs that represent a fully digital circuitry. On top of that, when the integrated circuit design is a mixed mode circuitry, it becomes much more complicated because analogue and digital circuitries are combined on one device and, in general, quite a lot of the analogue circuitries comprise very noisy sub-circuitries like charge pumps, buck boost converters, sepic converters, other dc/dc converters, etc., and quite a lot of analogue circuitries comprise very accurate sub-circuitries, like voltage and current references, sense amplifiers, analogue-to-digital converters, etc. In such a mixed mode environments, traditional ways of performing EMC tests, like analysing inter modulation and parasitic coupling paths, become very difficult.